Belonging to the established Builders and Fighters genre,
Team Micro Melee combines regular 1v1 melee with numerous
pick-and-choose squads for dynamic gameplay. With the experience-points
element, supporting members can advance to stronger units and better upgrades
to help protect the builder or lead the assault. As a team game, communication
is vital or else a player will have to futilely fend for himself. A couple of
mistakes builders usually make are not wisely positioning their squad-spawner
(Civ) and not simply entrusting his army to the squads (PsiEm), which are
important features to this tactics-focused game.

The "AI" prefix in the series of mini-defenses came from the
original Korean 개인 Lurker Defense map, in which the hangul means
"individual", but transcodes to "ÀÎ" on non-Korean localizations. Traits that
AI maps all share are the last-man-standing rule, individual tracks, and the
characteristic boomerang pathing. In AI Splash Defense, the
creator combined the strategy of splash defenses with the minimalism of AI
defenses, and as such, walling is even more essential in keeping the enemy
vulnerable to fire. AI maps are generally short games, but what makes them more
fun than longer ones is the ability to quickly master your strategies to
outplay others.

Most of the quality Bomberman maps are FFA style with
quick-thinking gameplay, such as BOMBERMAN 2.7 by [Ghost]Yoon. I
chose BOMBER PROBE as the representative of this emulative genre
in that it combines the fun of Bomberman games with the familiarity of tag
maps. On first play, the map appears to be a Cat & Mice game with the jail
zone in the center, and Mice/Probes running away from danger—except that
players now have the more powerful ability of blasting away numerous enemies in
entire rows or columns. Being the exact opposite of FFA maps, teamwork and
especially the avoidance of friendly fire, will be needed as bombers advance
through the nine diverse levels.

It was by serendipity that I came across this rather unique
Korean map while browsing the English staredit.net database. Comparable to the
hardest bound maps, Flower of Ice adds the excitement of shooting
games to the intensity of dodging gameplay. Basically the Flower
series is an adaptation of the bullet hell style shooting games, and
not being a misnomer, player-controlled ships must dodge rains of instant-kill
bullets while strafing the level's boss unit. To adapt the shooting aspect to
StarCraft, the creator split the player's "ship" to a dodger (Ling) and a
gunner (air unit); the player controls the Ling, while an anti-air unit is
constantly created and removed near the Ling to simulate a variable-rate
shooter. As it is a challenging game, players will have to practice and replay
the map several times to really enjoy its complexity.

Rarely are maps in the same series featured twice in the
SCMOTD, but once again the freedom of squad customization and the dynamics of
individual and team play—signature to the Single and Team Control
series—have proven to make this map very replayable. SAT Control 2
expands from its prequel by letting players choose one of two enemy groups each
level and integrating a boss level every five. Gameplay is enhanced by
experience points based bonuses, allowing more resources or energy per round.
Though the game sometimes limits what players can buy to prevent overpowering
the enemy, it is still essentially a sandbox game and players are free to
experiment and have fun every time they play.